Alcohol Minimalist: Change Your Drinking Habits! | All the Bitter Non-Alcoholic Bitters Company

Show Notes

This week on the show I'm joined by Co-Founder and Owner of All the Bitter, Ian Blessing. 

Want to try it out? Use code MOLLY10 to get a 10% discount. Order here.

Founded by two former French Laundry sommeliers, All The Bitter is a lineup of non-alcoholic cocktail bitters that lift the spirit. Made by hand from organic, wild-foraged, and functional botanicals in a process that takes nearly two months, our bitters elevate cocktails—with and without alcohol—mixers like tonic and ginger beer, and are especially refreshing in sparkling water with a squeeze of citrus. Find us on social media @allthebitter and at allthebitter.com.

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Low risk drinking guidelines from the NIAAA:

Healthy men under 65:

No more than 4 drinks in one day and no more than 14 drinks per week.

Healthy women (all ages) and healthy men 65 and older: No more than 3 drinks in one day and no more than 7 drinks per week.

One drink is defined as 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine, or 1.5 ounces of 80-proof liquor. So remember that a mixed drink or full glass of wine are probably more than one drink.

Abstinence from alcohol Abstinence from alcohol is the best choice for people who take medication(s) that interact with alcohol, have health conditions that could be exacerbated by alcohol (e.g. liver disease), are pregnant or may become pregnant or have had a problem with alcohol or another substance in the past.

Benefits of “low-risk” drinking Following these guidelines reduces the risk of health problems such as cancer, liver disease, reduced immunity, ulcers, sleep problems, complications of existing conditions, and more. It also reduces the risk of depression, social problems, and difficulties at school or work.

If you' are unsure about whether or not you have alcohol use disorder, please visit the NIAAA for more information.

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What is Alcohol Minimalist: Change Your Drinking Habits! ?

The Alcohol Minimalist podcast is dedicated to helping habit drinkers and adult children of alcoholics to change their drinking habits and create a peaceful relationship with alcohol: past, present and future.

We are proof positive that you can break unbreakable habits and create a peaceful relationship with alcohol.

Becoming an alcohol minimalist means:
Choosing how to include alcohol in our lives following low-risk guidelines.
Freedom from anxiety around alcohol use.
Less alcohol without feeling deprived.
Using the power of our own brains to overcome our past patterns and choose peace.
The Alcohol Minimalist Podcast explores the science behind alcohol and analyzes physical and mental wellness to empower choice. You have the power to change your relationship with alcohol, you are not sick, broken and it's not your genes!

This show is intended for educational purposes and does not constitute medical advice. If you are physically dependent on alcohol, please seek medical help to reduce your drinking.

Hey, it's Molly from alcohol minimalist. What do you do in this October? I would love to have you join me in my more sober October challenge. What do I mean by more sober October, it simply means that we're going to add in more alcohol free days than you currently been doing, whether that's one or two or 31. It's up to you, you get to set your own goal and that's why it's more sober October. You can check it out and learn more at get got sunnyside.co/molly It's totally free. I've got prizes, I'm going to be going live every week to announce the prize winners, and it's just going to be an awesome event. So I would love to have you join me. You can learn more at get.sunnyside.co/molly and you can get registered today. Welcome to the alcohol minimalist podcast. I'm your host Molly watts. If you want to change your drinking habits and create a peaceful relationship with alcohol, you're in the right place. This podcast explores the strategies I use to overcome a lifetime of family alcohol abuse, more than 30 years of anxiety and worry about my own drinking and what felt like an unbreakable daily drinking habit. Becoming an alcohol minimalist means removing excess alcohol from your life. So it doesn't remove you from life. It means being able to take alcohol or leave it without feeling deprived. It means to live peacefully, being able to enjoy a glass of wine without feeling guilty and without needing to finish the bottle. With Science on our side will shatter your past patterns and eliminate your excuses. Changing your relationship with alcohol is possible. I'm here to help you do it. Let's start now. Well hello and welcome or welcome back to the alcohol minimalist podcast with me your host Molly Watts coming to you from well, it's a dry Oregon this morning. It's cool out there are raindrops still hanging around on the branches of the trees. There's more rain in the forecast of course because it's spring here in Oregon. But right now I just came in from a nice two mile walk my if you've listened or two recent podcasts I've shared in the Facebook group I'm on this morning light routine that I am just loving. So dive back in a couple of episodes ago I talked about it and or come visit us in the Facebook group. I'm talking more about morning light and why it's so valuable for us. But I am getting myself out regardless rain or shine here in Oregon for my morning walks. And this morning. I just didn't happen to get hit by any raindrops. So the good day. I am sharing this week on the podcast actually, before we get there. I do have a prize winner this week. It is if you'd like to be entered into the prize drawing into a prize drawing every other week for some alcohol, minimalist swag. All you got to do is leave a review of the podcast or of my book breaking the bottle legacy wherever you listen to podcasts wherever you pick up the book, and I will find you add you into the drawing. Today's winner is windy W en NY windy W N N Y. You submitted a podcast review and just said thank you for your words of wisdom. I appreciate I appreciate you very much. Well thank you. I appreciate you listening. And so like I said go enter in if you are the winner, so windy. W and NY, please email me Molly at Molly watts.com. Let me know that that is you and I will mail you out some minimalist alcohol minimalist swag. All right. Okay, on to this week's show. This is a podcast or an interview that I did a bit ago with yen blessing is not a great name in blessing. And Ian is a co founder of all the bitter, non alcoholic bitters company. I learned about this company from Adrian Stillman Krause over at dry goods beverage company and was just inspired to go talk to him and learn more about their journey and this whole non alcoholic beverage industry that has just been erupting over the last couple of years. And how they are a small, local, US based company and what they're doing in terms of creating some organic, all natural, non alcoholic bitters. You're gonna love this conversation and I hope that you are investigating some of these companies and some of these products that I've been talking to in terms of non alcoholic options. They are really great and they really help us right to include alcohol free days in Our lives, there is nothing wrong with that, that is a great thing to have. And I am so excited that there's actually all this work happening in the non alcoholic space that is supporting people to add more alcohol free days into their lives. I'm also talking about this week, if you're listening to this when this drops, which is on Wednesday, March 8, then on Friday, March 10, I will be going live in my Facebook group, talking about my plans for 70% alcohol free for the year, and how you can do that a strategic plan for different months, based on whether it's a 30 day month, a 31 day month and everything, I've got a great idea. I hope you'll join me come into the group, come listen, and learn and, and join arms with me whether or not you make it doesn't matter. The goal is there. And we want to set a goal for incorporating more alcohol free days into our life. I definitely do. I'm aiming for better than 50%. I'm aiming for 70%. And I'm going to be talking about that on Friday in the Facebook group. So come on in and learn more. All right, without further ado, here is my conversation with all the bitter company co founder in blessing. Hey, Ian, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for taking the time to be on the alcohol minimalist podcast. I am just super excited to have this conversation. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah. So okay, first of all, let's just get this. Let's get kind of an overview. Exactly what is all the better? What is it about? Kind of where did this idea come from? And tell me just a little bit more about the journey kind of how this became to be because like I said, I talked to you. I mean, you know, we talked about just briefly, I've always kind of thought about using like regular bidders as an opportunity to have a lower alcohol by volume drink, right? And I know people do that. But you decided to take it and make all the bitter non alcoholic completely. So tell me about that. So let me I'll kind of start with our backstory a little bit because that leads into to why we decided to do this. My wife Carly and I met at the French Laundry, we work together as Somalis. So our lives revolved 100% around wine, beer spirits, alcohol, drinking, you know, studying, we'd get up in the mornings to go do wine tastings, we would you know, taste and study at work, we would add fresh laundry for those of you that don't know, it's like a really famous restaurant in Napa. Right. So it's a pretty like high wine region. Exactly. And we spent essentially all of our time either, you know, working with or just consuming wine for for ourselves. And we drank too much. That's that's a fact. We drank too much. And we had kids and decided, when our our first son was a few months old that we were going to quit drinking, that we couldn't continue to drink the way that we were. Kids don't care if you're hungover. Kids don't care if you are, you know, still drunk at three o'clock or four o'clock in the morning, they aren't going to wake you up in need things. And it became very obvious very quickly that we couldn't, we couldn't continue living the way that we weren't. So we both decided to quit drinking. That was a little over three years ago. And we got really quickly you know, the the timing fortunately, of the non alcoholic beverage space of the boom of the you know, the the craft non alcoholic beer market, which is a crazy thing to say but that that boom started right around the same time. And we discovered that there were non alcoholic IPAs, non alcoholic stouts, and porters and sours and all of the same, you know, beers, the same flavors that we love so much, we realized that we could continue enjoying those flavors and enjoying the ritual of drinking those things without the negative consequences that we were trying to avoid. So we pretty quickly, dove way, way way down the rabbit hole and built a bar with 70 Plus non alcoholic spirits, a a wine fridge full of non alcoholic wine and beer. And we're making you know, amazing, delicious non alcoholic cocktails every night. But we realized that one of the things that was really missing from the marketplace, there were so many options for spirits, but one of the things that was missing were truly non alcoholic cocktail bitters. And this leads into now why why why create non alcoholic cocktail dinners because as you touched on, you can add a couple dashes of Angostura or you know any other traditional cocktail bitter to either a non alcoholic cocktail or a glass of soda water and create a very, very, very low alcohol drink. Right you can keep bid under, you know, point 5% alcohol, you can even you know, you can keep it technically non alcoholic, or, you know, if you're adding a few more dashes it'll, it'll raise the alcohol percentage slightly it might be you know, end up being 1% If you add, you know, let's say five dashes amount of writers to a drink, still not gonna get you drunk not gonna get you buzz you know it's the same thing as vanilla extract there's no problem with that, but it's an entirely personal decision. You know, we keep we don't drink but we keep alcoholic bitters on our bar. We use them occasionally. We use ours more now because we enjoy them. But we still you know, I don't have a problem using alcoholic bitters in my drinks. But lots of people do. There's a ton of drinkers ton of non drinkers, I'm sorry, that fair enough aren't comfortable, you know, with with putting a few dashes of 40% alcohol on top of their otherwise non alcoholic drink, you know, you're adding a very little amount, but it doesn't change the fact that it's still 40 to 45% Alcohol. There's a comfort level, you know, you can absolutely take the top of that bottle of Angostura and drink it, and you will get drunk. You can absolutely get drunk on bitters. If you know that you'd want to buy Wow, you you certainly can. There are cocktails that are made with with two ounces of bitters. It will get you just as drunk as anything else. But of course, using it in small amounts doesn't doesn't have that effect. So we wanted to create an option for the folks out there that weren't comfortable using alcoholic bitters. And were essentially cut off from so many wonderful cocktails like an old fashioned demand Hatton a soundtrack all these drinks that you can now make with non alcoholic spirits. But you previously had to use an alcoholic cocktail bitter, we wanted to create essentially analogues you know kind of one to one replacements for the traditional bitters out there like Angostura Peychaud's and orange bitters, we wanted to create something that was still unique arbiters are very herbal, they're they're they're very unique. They don't taste like anything else. But they are close enough to those traditional bitters that if you were making a non alcoholic cocktail, you can very easily just swap them in and not have to, you know, kind of worry about how much alcohol you're adding to your drink. Right. And I love these. So and also, that's the thing I love about your story and kind of embitters in general, right? I mean, there are actually good health benefits to including bitters in your life, you know, the non alcoholic version of them, obviously, when we are talking about alcohol and I talk about it all the time here whenever you're drinking alcohol and even if it is a low alcohol, by volume, you know, spirit like in like a bitters is, you are still consuming alcohol, right? Which is in the safest amount of alcohol is zero. So when you were making a conscious decision to be alcohol free, you can also incorporate these non alcoholic bitters into your life for positive health benefits that exist within them as well. Right? Absolutely. And that was that was one of the before we got started. That was one of the most important things to me was was blending both flavor and function and cocktail bitters. You know, it got their start in the 1800s. They were taken as a daily tonic. They were taken as medicine ingested right digested bitter. Yes. kind of the idea. Yeah. Well, they were back then they were used for a wide range of crazy things that obviously they didn't actually do. It was a bit of a snake oil thing. You know, they were supposed to cure jaundice and kidney failure and erectile dis reptile dysfunction, and the whole thing bad. Ever everything they were they were touted as being a cure all for everything. You know. We know that they don't do that. But they do. Absolutely. Just another reason for somebody to get to drink it in the first place. Correct. And that's, that's where the evolution of bitters, two cocktails came in, is that at some point, somebody said, these don't taste very good, but I'm supposed to take them as medicine. So what if I mix them with a spirit? What if I mixed it with whiskey or brandy? Right, that will make it taste better? It's the spoonful of sugar. Except that Spoonful of Sugar was two ounces of liquor at night, nine o'clock in the morning as you're waking up, but it was like No honey, I have to take this right now. So one thing led to another and eventually cocktail bitters came to be a key ingredient in in cocktails. They never lost their functional benefits, bitter flavors, bitter roots, bitter herbs. Essentially wake up our digestive system. You when you taste bitterness, your your brain says oh, I'm probably not It's supposed to be eating this and it starts to produce more bile it starts up, it starts the digestive juices flowing essentially, and gives you an easier time digesting your food. So there's still inherently a wonderful benefit to bitters whether alcoholic or non alcoholic, that that bitter flavor is incredibly beneficial. We decided to stick to the same traditional flavor profile as the the modern cocktail bitters that you'll find, you know, on the market today, but really decided to lean into those functional benefits in those functional ingredients. So rather than just using Jen Sheehan, which is a very classic bittering agent, we decided to also include dandelion root, and burdock root and yellow doc root and ginger and milk thistle seed, and adaptogens, like holy basil, and schizandra, Berry, and all these wonderful things that work really well in the flavor profile of bitters. But also really do a wonderful job of helping your digestive system, help clean your liver help you detox, help clean your blood, all those things that you get the benefit of, while you're just enjoying a tasty drink, you know, it's not like having to take your medicine, you're just like, I want a nice drink right now. And you get that nice benefit from it. So you mentioned some of the key, some of the key ingredients, one of the things I read on in terms of your story is just how dedicated to the craft of making these these small batch bidders that you guys are so tell me a little bit more about that. Because I now I'm not gonna build remember the way that it's phrased? But you for it, oh, yeah, that was it flourished. Like, like, you know, I get this image of you guys really, really taking a lot of care to, you know, trial and error and creating these, these non alcoholic bitters. It's one of the things that we enjoy most about doing this. So you know, our background, we sold wine for a living, you know, and beer and spirits, and we sold other people's stories. And starting this brand and starting our own company was our chance to do it ourselves and to be the people creating it. And it's such a wonderful experience. And there's you know, there's different ways that you can go about creating a product. Most products are made by somebody else, you you develop a recipe or formula, and then you have a co manufacturer, make it for you. It was really important to us right away that we did it ourselves, we wanted to get our hands dirty, we wanted to touch our product ourselves. We wanted to do all the work ourselves, both for quality reasons, but also just just for fun to make us you know, we wanted to feel connected to what we were doing. And so we use organic ingredients, and we use wild foraged ingredients, we don't do that was we, we don't do the foraging ourselves. Those see I like, you can visualize if you want to be absolutely. What we did do though, was was last year when before we were getting started, we built a garden, we built about 10 garden beds, and we intended to grow as much of the raw ingredient ourselves as we could. And we spent months building these beds and filling them with dirt and planting, you know, 15 of our, of the plants that we use, and all the time watering it intending for it. And we realized pretty quickly that we did not have the time to to farm to farm. If we were going to be developing recipes, physically making it doing all the shipping ourselves, which we do everything else that goes along with a business, social media Customer Service website. Just basic business functions. Gotta give there's only 24 hours in the day, we do so much. And we have two kids. That's why we we have a two year old and an almost four year old and they keep us on our toes. They keep us on an on a schedule with very little sleep. And we realized pretty quickly that we were not going to be able to maintain this garden in the way that we we hoped we could. And we ended up getting a very, very little harvest from it. Most of the things we tried to grow we were not gardeners we are not farmers. We've brought in you know, maybe 15 house plants and killed killed most of them. We have a very deep respect for for farmers and gardeners. And honestly at the end of the day, that's kind of why we did that. And the experience wasn't lost at all. You know, we did successfully harvest some ashwagandha that we used in some lavender bitters. That was pretty pretty cool. We harvested a couple other things successfully. But the most important thing is that it really gave us an appreciation for how much work goes into farming, gardening, growing things, how much water requires how much time it requires, how much physical labor and effort goes into harvesting, cutting drying these ingredients, there's no way that we could do that ourselves. But it gave us an incredibly deep respect for the farmers that we work with, and the product that we get. And so being able to, you know, physically receive that product ourselves and make this thing from start to finish, rather than, you know, sending it off to somebody else and having them do it for us. It is incredibly satisfying, and is really, you know, it just as difficult as starting you still I mean, you're still doing the production part, which is pretty amazing. In and of itself. We do it, we there's we have now beyond wild foraging, I'm getting this like, you know, mad scientist like boiling kind of image happening to so there is that's that's that's definitely there. That's that's a real, that's a real thing. We, we've talked about the different ways that we could go about this. And, you know, over the last year, we launched about 12 months ago, and the response has been absolutely wild. We made and shipped 30,000 bottles of bitters last year. And so considering when we started, we had no idea if this was if people were actually going to want or need non alcoholic cocktail bitters, because again, you can, most people are comfortable using alcoholic bitters and their non alcoholic cocktails. We weren't sure if there would be enough people that really wanted peace. And it was it was very apparent very quickly that that there was a need there was there was a need for them. And for the last 12 months have really just been kind of, you know, struggling to stay afloat and keep up with with demand, which is great. But you know, the the question has, obviously come up a couple of times, do we want to continue doing this ourselves? Should we outsource this? Should we outsource shipping? Carly who does all of our shipping, we'd like to outsource the shipping, we go back and forth on it. But it everything that we do has had such a positive impact on the folks that purchase our bitters. And it's obvious when you open that package that it was made by real people that it was not put, you know, assembled by a by an assembly line, it was packaged by a real person who actually made this and put love and care into it. And that's a feeling that's kind of hard to come by, you know, in the modern world with most of what we buy. And I think it's really obvious when you open our package, which is what we're going for. So we decided to continue doing this ourselves the way that we're doing it now. But to scale up to get bigger tanks, better equipment, hire, some employees get a bigger space. So we're in the process of doing that right now. We're doing a very small scale up we moved into, we were working out of about 150 square foot area of a shared commercial kitchen. And we moved into a larger, dedicated room in the same commercial kitchen. That's about 450 square feet. So not much bigger, but we have three times the space now. So we got some of that equipment, we got those tanks. And we're working on making, you know, bigger batches faster and better than than we did before. And hiring some employees to take a little bit of that, you know, day to day work off of our hands while we still will be there physically, you know, overseeing it and jumping in. And we'll still be doing plenty of the dirty work. But we'll have some assistance with it, which we haven't really had in the last 12 months. That's awesome. That's awesome. I think I appreciate the decision to stick with it in terms of keeping it in your purview, at a certain point in time if you really get well I don't even think you do. I mean I think you just you know you get to the next you just you do what you do what you've done and go from the 150 square foot to the 450 and then you eventually build your own commercial kitchen right? I mean, you don't have to outsource and I think that that is a great lesson for people especially in this world where we're so quick to send off our control to something else and it seems like the right you know, it can sound like the right answer for a lot of people and I would just I appreciate the decision to keep it just a quick break to talk with you about Sunnyside you hear me talk about it on the podcast and truthfully I have so many students and group members that share with me how Sunnyside is their preferred tool. It helps them build their healthier drinking habits and really create that peaceful relationship with alcohol. It's a tool that I feel very confident in recommending and the Sunnyside team has recently in September launched a new iOS app. And that iOS app is going to just enhance the existing text message experience. It makes it easier to build healthier drinking habits for anyone looking to cut back or simply drink more mindfully. The new Sunnyside community is also available only in the new iOS app. And it gives you access to an engaged community of like minded people who are also on a journey to cut back on drinking and build healthier drinking habits. It's a safe private space and you'll get access to inspiration and advice from Sunnyside members as well as coaches. I encourage you to go check out Sunnyside go to www.sunnyside.co/molly to get started on a free 15 day trial. That's www.sunnyside.co/molly. Tell me about the the flavors, the flavor profiles that you all have that are not the same names as the traditional bitters. But what they correlate to. Yeah, so we started with very intentionally three bitters that were inspired by what's kind of the Holy Trinity of alcoholic cocktail bitters. What you'll find behind every bar, the first is Angostura so if you're making 90 something percent of classic cocktails we're gonna call for Angostura or what's referred to as an aromatic bitter, which is a little confusing because all bitters are aromatic. Most things are aromatic. But the category of bitter the general flavor profile is called an aromatic bitter. And so that's what we called ours. It's just called aromatic bitters. And the flavor profile is a lot of warm spices, cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, all spice, we use a lot of ginger. There are, like I mentioned earlier, there's a ton there's a wide range of bitter and earthy ingredients, dandelion, burdock, yellow doc root, Genchi and root. So a lot of bitter, earthy, spicy, and spiced flavors and aromatic bitters. That sounds like something really good in tea to me like intuiting, that and tea really good and tea. And that's one of the things that people maybe don't realize about bitters until you start playing around with them is that they can go in anything. Bitters are the salt and pepper of the barchart. They're like seasoning for your drinks, you're only adding a little bit, you're adding a couple of dashes, you know, two milliliters three milliliters to your drink. The same essentially as a pinch of salt in food, you know, or squeeze a lemon on food. It's really meant to highlight existing flavors in your dish or your drink to balance things like sweetness or hardness. And to add a little bit of its own unique additional flavor, so that that bitterness is balancing elements of the drink. But it's also lending just a little bit because you're only adding a couple dashes. It's lending its own bitter flavor, its own, you know, spice flavor, and whatever else is in that particular bitter. So for instance, our New Orleans bitters, which is inspired by a very classic bit are called patients which is used in a Sazerac cocktail. A lot of the same warm spices, but the difference in ours is that you have tart cherry in there, we use high viscous, rose hips and a really good amount of anus, which is the classic flavor profile of patients right away immediately, when you smell it, you're gonna get a big hit of analysts. So if you don't like licorice, for instance, if you don't like that anise flavor, you're probably not going to enjoy these. But if you do, the combination of flavors is absolutely wonderful. It's our most fruit forward bitter because it does have that cherry. But it's just super complex and tart and really, just kind of wonderful on its own. That's our favorite to just mix I think with soda water to make a bit of soda. That along with a squeeze of lime is really satisfying. But yeah, you can use any of these in coffee, tea, water, ginger, beer, tonic, cocktails, obviously. But any number of drinks, you can you can have these two. So that's our New Orleans bitters. And the last is an orange bitter. We the inspiration for ours came specifically from a classic orange binder called Regan's which has a good amount of cardamom and coriander so we use that in our bitter as well. But again, like the rest of our lineup, it's, you know, kind of classically inspired but still entirely unique. We use a wider range of herbs of roots. There's a very interesting herbal flavor and aroma to our orange bitters. We use lemon balm in there and which really separates, it makes it very distinct from from any other orange butter that I've tried. Again, along with, you know, a host of warm spices like cinnamon and ginger and nutmeg, and there's a couple other other things in there as well. But a very, you know, bright, kind of zesty flavor profile while still being you know, pretty, pretty warm and verbal. Just a very, very complex butter. Wow, I am I'm excited to get all these trial days, I'm really like it, uh, I can see so many uses for them. I know that for one of the things that I've learned is the tannins in tea kind of can be similar to people, especially for wine drinkers. In general, the non alcoholic wine industry seems to be not quite as sophisticated as everything else. No one seems to be able to very, very few non alcoholic wines that people really truly love, and especially for red wine drinkers. And so one of the things that I've heard or learned is that the tannins in tea for people that are that are red wine drinkers that can be really appealing so I can see that maybe, you know, combining tea and and non alcoholic bitters would be something that especially maybe the one with the tart cherry, and it might give somebody a real, you know, red wine ish experience. Yeah, yeah, no, you're 100% Correct. There's a trick with tea. If you oversleep it, so you know, let it sit for 10 minutes in the hot water as opposed to the five that you might normally you're going to extract more of those aggressive tannins that you might not like in tea on its own. You know, if you're just going to drink that cup of black tea straight you're gonna think oh, there's there's something wrong with this. But it does work to give you that same kind of abrasive tannin that makes your mouth think oh, I'm I'm drinking something. I'm drinking an adult beverage you know that it's it forces you to slow down in the same way that that drinking that the tannins in wine do. There's actually a recipe in the cocktail book that we send along with with all of our orders. It's essentially a play on red wine using overstamped black T shirt, shrub A, we use a Blackberry Rosemary shrub, which is shrub if you're not familiar shrub is basically drinking vinegar. It's It's vinegar combined with fruit, any number of spices or herbs that you might want to throw in there. And sugar. You don't drink it on its own. It's meant to be mixed with sparkling water. But you can also use it in cocktails as a cocktail ingredient, you know, you can use half an ounce or an ounce of shrub. And it's it's an incredibly satisfying addition to non alcoholic cocktails. Because that vinegar gives you a kind of a little punch. You know, the tightness of vinegar again forces you to slow down you the the problem with the mocktails of you know, the last 20 years was that they were basically just juice and soda. There's nothing slowing you down. So you're essentially drinking a glass of juice doesn't feel like an adult cocktail, you know about a sugar in it to correctly exactly the you know what separates cocktails from any other drink is that you drink it slowly. Alcohol obviously forces you to drink it slowly gets complex you stop you think about it. You know you can pick out nuances of the drink as you drink it. You know, a mocktail made from juice and soda and syrup doesn't do that you can you can chug it. Things like shrub and and overstamped Tea, the tannins and tea force you to drink a little more slowly, they forced you to sit there and kind of contemplate and think about what it is you're drinking. So this recipe in our book basically combines tea shrub virtue, which is a very tart grape juice. So it's actually virtue is made from wine grapes that aren't fermented, and they're picked very early. So they're, they're more tart than they are sweet. And then yes, like you mentioned our New Orleans bitters or our aromatic bitters which share a lot in common with the flavors and wine. And so those things all combined to make, you know, essentially a very satisfying, very complete drink that's reminiscent of wine. It's totally different. It's not going to fool you into thinking that it's wine. Right? But but it does provide the same kind of satisfying experience where it's balanced. If there's a you know, there's a long finish there's a roundness of flavors, there's a beginning middle and end there's an interesting aroma you can sit there and actually smell it you know, and taste it and sip on it and enjoy it for a little while. This coming from a Somalia folks so obviously, yeah, right. You know your stuff. So I would hope I would bet this that recipe is one worth checking out in tell the folks here how they can learn more about all the better. So our website and our social media are going to be the The best places to go our website is all the bitter.com. And you can find us on Instagram and Facebook. We don't do Twitter or or Tik Tok. We're not there yet, but Instagram and Facebook, you can find us at all the bitter. Awesome. We will put that in the show notes, folks. So you can check it out. I just can't wait for people to go check more out. I hope Carly is ready to do some more packaging because I have a feeling that you're going to get some more interest here. She has we are as as difficult as it is to ship 30,000 bottles of bitters in a year. It's something that we we love and is incredibly gratifying and satisfying. So we look forward to it. Yeah, this has been a it's been a great year, and I can only imagine things are going to keep growing for you for you. So all the best congratulations on it. And like I said, Folks, we'll put links in the show notes. You and I are working on a discount code. We'll probably pop that in there too. And check it out all the bitter.com I think you're gonna love it. I can't wait to try it. If you liked it, loved it. I'd love to hear from you. So, thank you, Ian blessing for being on the show, and all the best to you, Carly and the kids. Thanks so much for having me, Molly. Thank you for listening to the alcohol minimalist podcast. This podcast is dedicated to helping you change your drinking habits and to create a peaceful relationship with alcohol. Use something you learned in today's episode and apply it to your life this week. Transformation is possible. You have the power to change your relationship with alcohol now, for more information, please visit me at www dot Molly watts.com